My Most Grievous Fault: the Moral Problem of Wealth

“How can I make you realize the misery of the poor? How
can I make you understand that your wealth comes from their weeping?” –
St. Basil the Great.

“Not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from
the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own
wealth, but theirs.” – St. John Chrysostom

It is always easier to accuse than to confess. But in
reality we’re all sinners of one sort or another sitting together in the
dock. I have long been, and will continue to be, an opponent of inequality and
economic and environmental injustice, and a critic of the Money Power
that rules our nation.

However, by the standards of the world, I am rich
myself, and I benefit from the comfort and largess of living in
America, a globally dominant and fabulously wealthy nation. To borrow from
the terminology of the Hunger Games series, I live in the
Capitol—the rest of the world’s nations are akin to subordinate districts,
embedded in our system and serving it in one way or another. And I’m
no mere simple denizen of the Imperial City—I’m somewhere in the top 5 or 6% of
income earners nationally and, like almost every other American, I’m also part
of the global 1%. [1] That isn’t serf or petit-bourgeoisie territory, even when
other factors that typically skew such comparisons like cost of living,
dependents, and purchasing power are taken into account.

Therefore, when I condemn “the rich,” I indict
myself. Though I am loath to admit it, I’m more Dives than Lazarus—a
comfortable man with many possessions who consumes far more than I
actually need. So when Pope Francis says that our economy kills, in
truth it kills for me. And it’s no defense to point at others and say—“they
have even more blood on their hands than I.”

In his book I See
Satan Fall Like Lightning[2], the
late René Girard presciently dissects our unquestioning assumption
of moral superiority over others. We hold a simple conceit: that, if
faced with similar circumstances, we would do things differently. And
as a result, we, to use Jesus’s analogy, build monuments to the
victims of our neighbors. We are always aware of the Other’s sins, the
Other’s faults, and the Other’s victims, but blind to our own. Given the
pervasiveness of this phenomenon, then-Cardinal Ratzinger was correct
to identify Psalm 19:12-13 (“But who can discern their own errors? Forgive
my hidden faults.”) as the “the profoundest human wisdom.” [3]

Only an honest recognition and confession of
our own complicity in sin prevents the cancer of self-righteousness
from taking hold within us.

I think this kind of self-awareness and honesty about
our own guilt is the point of departure for a real revolution of the heart.
Without it, we are only scapegoating those wealthier than ourselves and
weaponizing victims—the poor, immigrants, etc.—and perhaps
even Christianity itself, to use as cudgels to beat our
neighbors. Without it, we don’t encounter the Other on the common ground
of our mutual brokenness and speak to them as equals, but rather from
a false position of superiority—and then we lecture.

Awareness of our own complicity in evil is also
a necessary prerequisite for humility before God and mercy towards
others. And mercy, Matthew 9:13 and Hosea 6:6, is our Ariadne’s thread
running through all the scriptural and doctrinal mazes and the
challenges of discernment that we face in modernity.

Neither the Church in America nor we, the
faithful in her pews, have truly even begun to come to grips with the moral
problems posed by wealth and empire. It would disturb our comfort and
unsettle our sense of ourselves. And while we do at times think and talk
about economic injustice within our own society, we rarely
acknowledge the truth—that we stand at the apex of a global system of inequality
and exploitation, and are its primary beneficiaries. Nor do we recognize
that we live within, and are the products of, a culture that
is entirely driven by the love of money and material
acquisitiveness, which leads to consumerism and a utilitarian commodification
of everything—labor, marriage, education, the natural world, even religion
itself. As a result, as St. John Chrysostom recognized, we are all
thieves, robbing “those who are poorer than [our]selves.” Finally, with few
exceptions, we do not use our hoarded wealth for socially useful
purposes. We ignore the fact that all our prized possessions are subject
to a social mortgage, and that we have defaulted on the loan.

We participate in, and benefit
from, structures of sin. But we are blind to our own role in them.
We condemn the hypocrisy of, say, a Thomas Jefferson, who had the
luxury to write noble words about human freedom and liberty because of the
wealth generated by slaves—slaves who worked outside his very
window while he sat quill-in-hand. But we are worse hypocrites. Jefferson
at least had to look his bondsmen in the eye and knew them each by
name—ours are anonymous nonpersons toiling in wretched conditions in,
for example, the garment factories of Bangladesh, Myanmar, or the Maldives.
They live and labor for us out of sight, and out of mind. But the Lord hears
their cries, even if we do not.

If our faith is true, then we—the world’s rich and
comfortable—live under the shadow of a terrible judgment.
I live luxury and splendor compared to the overwhelming
majority of my brothers and sisters. I benefit from the expropriation of
things held in common and the withholding of just wages. And I know
what my reward for this will be. When the rich weep and wail (Jas 5:4)—I
will likely be among their number. I hope at least to be a penitent thief in
the end.